Elam, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. These reliefs do not aim at vivid profiles or silhouettes but at a refined illusion of three-dimensional reality. The vitality of the tiny organisms, the sense of a life-energy welling from within them and swelling to their surfaces, makes manifest at an almost incredibly early date one of the most characteristic traits of later Indian art.

I. The Ideal of Feminine Beauty

There has been so far no study of the Tamil ideals of feminine beauty as found in Tamil literature and South Indian Art. However, HEINRICH ZIMMER again, is able to trace a distinct difference between the Art of the South and the Art of the North concerning feminine beauty, The Art of Indian Asia, Vol. I, pages 114 to 117.

AND SO NOW we can return to the South Indian bronzes and their evidence of the evolution of the Indian ideal of feminine beauty. The Ceylonese Paṭṭinī Devī of the seventh to tenth century is close to the traditional form, with its marked contrast of the slender waist against the heavy breasts and hips. The goddess, dignified and graceful in this manifestation, represents the chastity and virtue of the housewife and mother. Her image expresses fully the perennial type of Hindu womanhood-though with a certain dryness peculiar to the Dravidian tradition, which accords readily with a work in metal. For in this art the human body is not conceived of, primarily, as a mass emerging slowly, under hammer and chisel, from the shapeless matter of the rock; it comes into form as a kind of engraving imposed on the soft material of a waxen model, there being no resistance to the instrument that cuts into wax. And the finishing process, in its turn, is a technique like that of designing. It does not shape a formless block, but smooths out and covers an already modeled surface.

One feels, when looking back from such a late work to the much earlier yakṣīs of the Mathurā school of the second century A.D. that, essentially, the general features of feminine beauty have scarcely changed in India through the centuries; and yet the type found in other works of the South is dramatically different from that of the North. This cannot be explained as the result of a general evolution in the Indian ideal of woman; neither is it a consequence of the special conditions and possibilities of the metalwork technique. It derives simply from the fact that there is here involved another population (that of Southern India), another ethnic group (the